Quality and Effectiveness: Designed for use as a
personal database, Bento 4 helps manage several types
of information, including contacts, media, and geographic
locations. The program also links to calendar events and
tasks available to your iCal application and photos in your
iPhoto library.

This newest version of Bento
can print data to 250 Avery
and Dymo labels, which comes
in handy for mass mailings, ID
badges, and marking file folders.
Event location fields are useful,
for example, in an outdoor
science class in which students
want to document the locations
of plants or animals. The program’s
ability to connect libraries
of information is useful also. You
can add custom fields to any Bento 4 database template or
form, examine data from many views, and change forms’
layout, design, and text size as needed. Templates, with or
without database data, can be exported and shared with
other users.

Ease of Use: Bento 4 comes with 35 ready-to-use
templates to get you started. Additional templates are
available free for download from the Bento Template
Exchange. If you already have a spreadsheet table, the
program lets you create a new database library simply by
copying rows and columns from that table and pasting the
data into a blank Bento table.

Creative Use of Technology: Bento 4 lets you share
an entire Bento database (or just selected libraries in the
database) simultaneously with as many as five other Bento
users connected over a local network. Like earlier versions,
Bento 4 supports Smart Collections of data that update
automatically when records meeting defined criteria are
entered in a library collection. Version 4, however, lets you
create Smart Collections for time-sensitive information,
such as a particular date or time.

Suitability for Use in a School Environment:
Bento 4 prevents users from entering the same data more
than once and saves changes automatically as users enter
information. Users can link related data sets.

Top Features

¦ Affordable, and prints labels and tracks
locations.
¦ Databases can be shared with as many
as five users simultaneously, and
teachers and students can “publish”
Bento 4 templates to the Bento
Template Exchange.
¦ Bento 4 works well with Bento for iPad
and Bento for iPhone, enabling users to
sync data with Bento for Mac and vice
versa.

Overall Rating

This versatile application scores high marks for getting
administrators, teachers, and students in Mac-based
schools working with databases. More than a glorified
contact manager, it offers a variety of ways to keep data
organized.